Monday, April 30, 2007

After digging for some remaining bugs and helped a lot by Nickolay Shmyrev, Evince maintainer, I was finally able to release the packages for N800 and 770. They are already available in both bora (N800) and gregale (770) extras repositories. Here are the direct links to the .install files:

In my opinion, Evince fits perfectly as replacement for the built-in PDF reader. Please report here any issues, specially about performance. We are now using libcairo as backend for rendering PDFs in libpoppler. Thanks to the great work done by cairo gurus we could replace the splash backend used in the previous versions of the package.

Is it posible to open index/table of contents in pdf in fullscreen mode? It seems to be hardcoded to be off in full screen. Also I didn't find 'go to page number' so in fact in fullscreen mode there is no way to go to specific page, just next one or previous.

I've had some problems uploading the djvu libraries to the maemo extra repositories. The packages are ready, I tried upload them more than once and succeeded (with this I mean no errors) but the packages did never appear in the repository.

I'm waiting for a response of the responsible for the extras repository, and as soon as I get it, I'll upload the evince packages with DJVU support.

I can read djvu files on N800 if install evince_0.5.2-indt5_armel.deb from http://bgran.net/etrunko/apt/pool/user/e/evince/ , but if I upgrade evince to version 8 or latest 9 it does not recognize djvu format.Therefore I installed version 5.

Updating the mime types worked until yesterday when I upgraded to the latest OS 2007. Now evince doesn't recognize .cbr files and updating the mime types as described here doesn't change that. Could it be shared-mime-info_0.17-0indt1_armel.deb has to be updated?

I have an n800 and the evince version is 0.9.0. It does not recognize .cbr/cbz. Should it? Do I need to compile with the comics extenion or anything? If so, can someone please post instructions?Many thanks.

Having said that, there is one extremely annoying thing when using with comics (may not be that much of a problem when using evince as a pdf reader) -- after each book (which is typically no longer than 20-40 pages) I have to:- select File/Open,- wait for fileselector to populate, which takes ages with more than dozen files in a directory, not uncommon with longer series,- wait for the second instance of evince to load the file,- re-select with the menu all the necessary viewing parameters (in my usage pattern this is usually deselecting View/Continuous and selecting View/Fullscreen),- switch to previous instance,- select File/Close.

Probably better solution for the portable/pocket viewer would be, when trying to move past the end of the file, to offer the user (with the simple Yes/No dialog) the possibility to open next file in the same directory, using the same instance and retaining all view settings.

I've looked in the source code and as rusty my skills are this should be the matter of probably 20 lines of code (finding next file, confirmation, replacing URI and performing reload), but setting up the SDK and recompiling/repackaging the whole thing is slightly over my head (and believe me, I tried).